Like thousands of northeast Ohio students this week, the Hingetown Jazz Festival is headed back to school adding student ensembles from four area colleges and universities to the lineup of Saturday’s all-day, all-local free festival.
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Overjoyed wasn’t the first choice for the theme of this year’s University of Akron Jazz Week ’26 that begins today. “At first we said gratitude, but there was something about it that wasn’t as killing,” said Chris Coles, who curates the four-day celebration and festival with his fellow UA faculty member and frequent musical collaborator Theron Brown.
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Though hip-hop artists have made it a genre unto itself, the mixtape, a homemade cassette of songs, was the Spotify playlist of the 1980s and ‘90s. Mixtapes were playable, tradable declarations of musical allegiances and taste, a medium of exchange and sometimes winsome mash notes to crushes, delivering their message at 1 7/8 ips.
True, it’s hard to imagine jazz nerds assembling cassettes of favorite Maynard Ferguson cuts to give to romantic objects (harder still to imagine they had such objects). Still guitarist Dan Bruce liked the concept so much that he’s making a mixtape live and on stage by arranging songs performed by Liz Bullock, Ray Flanagan, Jinari Kemet and Gretchen Pleuss with an a-list jazz ensemble.
With Labor Day in the rearview mirror, northeast Ohio returns to the comfortable (clambakes, sweaters) and maybe less comfortable (fretting about the Browns) routines of early autumn. Hey, traditions are traditions, and they don’t change much–unless you’re a NEO jazz fan in which case you’ll want to add the Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival to your list.
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With the outdoor concert and festival season coming to a close, jazz and creative music returns to the small rooms where the music was born. This week’s most compelling shows all feature Northeast Ohio musicians, proving that football and clambakes aren’t the only autumn traditions to honor around here.
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